All-American Girl
It has been over 60 years since women first started taking the matters of war into their own hands. During World War II, Rosie the Riveter left home to go to work while American soldiers fought overseas.
This time, with the war in Iraq, American women are leaving home and heading to…the competition stage?
ABC’s newest reality show is hunting for the epitome of what it means to be an “all-American girl.”
Forget working jobs that would callous carefully manicured fingers, these girls are all about proving that they have what it means to be the essence of patriotism: a well-toned body, a quick and apt brain, and that bubbly, confident personality we recognize so well in cheerleaders.
One of the biggest problem with this show is, well, the contestants are girls. With a very narrow age range, 19- to 23-years-of-age, these girls are on the cusp of womanhood.
At first glance these girls seem to have an abundance of good cheer and energy but are lacking on the maturity side.
One girl, Natalie, bailed on two of the physical activities.
The first activity was a simulated ocean rescue.
All the other girls managed to complete the swim out to the buoy, retrieve the dummy, and return it safely to shore in roughly three minutes.
Natalie? She quit after less than a minute. She had not even gotten her hair wet but turned in anyway, claiming the rough waters were just too much for her. She looked like she was going to cry about it.
The second activity was a slide down a fire pole and a climb up a rock-climbing wall.
Natalie got out of that one by the doctor’s order. According to her they were there at the show and were adamant about her not risking further injury to her body.
But Natalie was not the only one with an attitude problem.
Tarah, one of the younger girls on the show, seemed camera-shy at first, but then quickly launched into a proud listing of all her accomplishments and stellar qualities.
She may have graduated from high school at the age of 15 with a 4.5 grade point average and then gone on to graduate from college Summa Cum Laude, but there is such a thing as too smart for your own good. Her brains did not help her advance to the next episode.
But the worst part of the show, by far, was when the girls were all asked the same question and then were given 20 seconds in which to give their individual responses.
The question was what is the best invention in history and why. Some girls had mundane answers like the automobile, the radio, television, electricity, the computer, but a few girls had really random answers like the toilet and breast implants.
Breast implants? I doubt that even most guys would agree with that.
I kept waiting for one girl to answer with the printing press, because in my head all I could hear was Dr. Randall King saying, “the printing press… 1455… Gutenberg Bible.”
But no one did.